North Side promotes Marq Abram to lead girls basketball program

North Side turned to a familiar face to take over a girls program that has spent two decades searching for traction.

Marq Abram was named the next head coach of the Legends on May 12, giving North Side an internal promotion rather than a prolonged outside search. Abram had spent the 2025-26 season as an assistant boys basketball coach under Shabaz Khaliq, and before Khaliq returned to North Side he logged six seasons as an assistant under Gary Andrews. He also coaches girls flag football at the school, a detail that made him an already established part of the athletic department’s daily rhythm.

That familiarity matters because the move was about more than simply filling a vacancy. North Side chose someone who already knew the building, the players around the program and the expectations that come with coaching in Fort Wayne. For a girls team trying to stabilize after years of uneven results, Abram’s promotion signals that the school valued continuity and relationships over a reset built around a long external search.

The job he inherits is steep. Michael Wallace coached the program for seven seasons, finishing 17-139 overall. North Side went 0-21 in 2025-26 and ended the year with only five varsity players, a sign of how thin the roster had become. Wallace’s best season came in 2022-23, when the Legends went 7-16, but the program still had not finished at .500 since Katie Jackson led the then-Redskins to a 10-10 mark in 2003-04.

Abram’s first test will be turning that roster reality into a workable path forward. In the short term, that means keeping players engaged, building trust with families and giving the program a clear voice heading into offseason work and summer basketball. In the longer view, North Side needs more than a new name on the door. It needs a coach who can help it retain players, develop them and make the girls program more competitive in a city where expectations for high school basketball never stay quiet for long. Abram’s in-school promotion gives the Legends a chance to start that climb without wasting time learning the landscape.